February 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: My favorite line from the DOJ's latest draft bill
by Mike Rosing 10 Feb '03

10 Feb '03

On Sun, 9 Feb 2003, Declan McCullagh wrote: > http://www.dailyrotten.com/source-docs/patriot2draft.html > terrorism is at least as dangerous to the United States' national security > as drug offenses That's a good find! People sitting around laughing their butts off is really a dangerous phenomena! Just like the killing of 3000 people! I want the drugs those guys have, there's no view of reality warped quite that bad I've ever seen on of my "trips!" Patience, persistence, truth, Dr. mike

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Bingo! Why Bearer-Settled Recursive Auction Markets will work (was re:[NEC] 2.3: Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality)
by R. A. Hettinga 10 Feb '03

10 Feb '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Remember Eric Hughes' "institutionalized" digital piracy market, and, before him, the Agoric guys, and their Digital Silk Road stuff? Remember what I said about how, in such a market, the people who made the *new* stuff first would make the most money, about the first copy being the most valuable? Read this, and then go look at the charts on the web. It's important. Now, think about a bearer-settled cash auction of the first copies of new content into a napster-like network. Remember that each cryptographically-authenticated (I dislike the word "signed", I agree with Perry Metzger and Carl Ellison; "signature" doesn't mean what it says) copy is fungible. It's the same as any other. Thus, the market, like all commodity markets, is operating, in an economic terms of art, under perfect competition. I'd always thought that the price curve in hops from the original source and, in time from a given product's introduction to the net, would look like power curves, or maybe a gamma distribution, but, in Clay's article below, here's proof, or at least as much proof as we're going to get until we actually do it. I expect that the propagation rates of these markets are going to be *very* fast, which follows from the speed with which information flows through the net. Seen in three dimensions, with the charts laid on top of each other we get something that looks like what happens after a water drop hits a smooth pond. This idea of recursive auction markets across a geodesic network is, for the most part, a fundamental indictment of the very economic efficacy of copyright on a geodesic network. In getting what people want for what they're most willing to pay for it, for the lowest cost of production and distribution, this kind of market will make more money, faster, for the *producers* of content, and will adequately compensate the *distributors* of content (people who continually resell their copies to the highest bidders, of course :-)), while, at the same time, not requiring monitoring the entire system by a single entity. Like Gilmore said about censorship, if there's cash and an auction mechanism, the network will finally see copyright as damage and route around it. Cheers, RAH - --- begin forwarded text User-Agent: Microsoft-Entourage/10.1.0.2006 To: <nec(a)shirky.com> From: nec-admin(a)shirky.com Subject: [NEC] 2.3: Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality Sender: nec-admin(a)shirky.com Date: Sat, 08 Feb 2003 12:54:00 -0500 Status: R NEC @ Shirky.com, a mailing list about Networks, Economics, and Culture Published periodically / # 2.3 / February 8, 2003 Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License Subscribe at http://shirky.com/nec.html In this issue: - Introduction - Essay: Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality (Also at http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html) - Reader feedback on The Big Flip: I was wrong - The O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference * Introduction ======================================================= This issue's essay is on the inevitability of power laws in social systems, and in particular in the weblog world. I have lived through a decade of seeing social systems on the internet start small and egalitarian and grow large and unequal, and every time it has happened, some of the users of the system have taken it upon themselves to complain that the the Old Guard had gotten cliquish, or that the newbies were not living up to what was expected of them, or [insert psychological explanation here.] These explanations, focussed as they were on individual behaviors, never seemed to me to be adequate to describe what was obviously structural change that happened to all kinds of systems. Recently, work by Barabasi, Huberman, and Watts have all pointed to ways in which power law distributions, where the rank of the Nth item is 1/Nth that of the first item, arise in social systems. The structural inevitability of power laws explain these kinds of inequalities in social systems far better than any explanation focussed on the actions of individual members of the system. One note: the essay includes three figures, accompanying this mail as attachments, but it may be easier to read on the web, at http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html. Also, because inbound spam to the list is now so extreme, I have a choice between working from home enlarging my genitals with HGH while waiting for my check from Nigeria to clear, or auto-flushing inbound mail. Much to the disappointment of Madame Abacha, I am taking the latter course of action, so if you have a response to something you read here, please respond to me directly, at clay at shirky dot com. - -clay * Essay ============================================================== Weblogs, Power Laws, and Inequality (http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html) A persistent theme among people writing about the social aspects of weblogging is to note [http://www.fawny.org/decon-blog.html] (and usually lament [http://onepotmeal.com/blog/archives/001178.html] the rise of an A-list, a small set of webloggers who account for a majority of the traffic in the weblog world. This complaint follows a common pattern we've seen with MUDs, BBSes, and online communities like Echo and the WELL. A new social system starts, and seems delightfully free of the elitism and cliquishness of the existing systems. Then, as the new system grows, problems of scale set in. Not everyone can participate in every conversation. Not everyone gets to be heard. Some core group seems more connected than the rest of us, and so on. Prior to recent theoretical work on social networks, the usual explanations invoked individual behaviors: some members of the community had sold out, the spirit of the early days was being diluted by the newcomers, et cetera. We now know that these explanations are wrong, or at least beside the point. What matters is this: Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality, and the greater the diversity, the more extreme the inequality. In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution. - - A Predictable Imbalance Power law distributions, the shape that has spawned a number of catch-phrases like the 80/20 Rule and the Winner-Take-All Society, are finally being understood clearly enough to be useful. For much of the last century, investigators have been finding power law distributions in human systems. The economist Vilfredo Pareto observed that wealth follows a "predictable imbalance", with 20% of the population holding 80% of the wealth [http://bently.com/articles/999pareto.asp] The linguist George Zipf observed that word frequency falls in a power law pattern [http://linkage.rockefeller.edu/wli/zipf/] with a small number of high frequency words (I, of, the), a moderate number of common words (book, cat cup), and a huge number of low frequency words (peripatetic, hypognathous). Jacob Nielsen observed power law distributions in web site page views, and so on. [http://www.useit.com/alertbox/zipf.html] We are all so used to bell curve distributions that power law distributions can seem odd. The shape of Figure #1, several hundred blogs ranked by number of inbound links, is roughly a power law distribution. Of the 433 listed blogs, the top two sites accounted for fully 5% of the inbound links between them. (They were InstaPundit and Andrew Sullivan, unsurprisingly.) The top dozen (less than 3% of the total) accounted for 20% of the inbound links, and the top 50 blogs (not quite 12%) accounted for 50% of such links. http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw/figure1.gif Figure #1: 433 weblogs arranged in rank order by number of inbound links. The data is drawn from N.Z Bear's 2002 work on the blogosphere ecosystem [http://www.truthlaidbear.com/ecosystem.shtml] a project that is now sadly defunct. The inbound link data is just an example: power law distributions are ubiquitous. Yahoo Groups mailing lists ranked by subscribers is a power law distribution. (Figure #2) LiveJournal users ranked by friends is a power law. (Figure #3) The traffic to this article will be a power law, with a tiny percentage of the sites sending most of the traffic. If you run a website with more than a couple dozen pages, pick any time period where the traffic amounted to at least 1000 page views, and you will find that both the page views themselves and the traffic from the referring sites will follow power laws. http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw/figure2.gif Figure #2: All mailing lists in the Yahoo Groups Television category, ranked by number of subscribers (Data from September 2002.) http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw/figure3.gif Figure #3: LiveJournal users ranked by number of friends listed. (Data from March 2002) - - Rank Hath Its Privileges The basic shape is simple - in any system sorted by rank, the value for the Nth position will be 1/N. For whatever is being ranked -- income, links, traffic -- the value of second place will be half that of first place, and tenth place will be one-tenth of first place. (There are other, more complex formulae that make the slope more or less extreme, but they all relate to this curve.) We've seen this shape in many systems. What've we've been lacking, until recently, is a theory to go with these observed patterns. Now, thanks to a series of breakthroughs in network theory by researchers like Albert-Lazlo Barabasi [http://www.nd.edu/~alb/] Duncan Watts [http://smallworld.sociology.columbia.edu/watts.html] and Bernardo Huberman [http://www.hpl.hp.com/shl/people/huberman/] among others, breakthroughs being described in books like Linked [http://isbn.nu/0738206679] Six Degrees [http://isbn.nu/0393041425] and The Laws of the Web [http://isbn.nu/0262083035] we know that power law distributions tend to arise in social systems where many people express their preferences among many options. We also know that as the number of options rise, the curve becomes more extreme. This is a counter-intuitive finding -- most of us would expect a rising number of choices to flatten the curve, but in fact, increasing the size of the system increases the gap between the #1 spot and the median spot. A second counter-intuitive aspect of power laws is that most elements in a power law system are below average, because the curve is so heavily weighted towards the top performers. In Figure #1, the average number of inbound links (cumulative links divided by the number of blogs) is 31. The first blog below 31 links is 142nd on the list, meaning two-thirds of the listed blogs have a below average number of inbound links. We are so used to the evenness of the bell curve, where the median position has the average value, that the idea of two-thirds of a population being below average sounds strange. (The actual median, 217th of 433, has only 15 inbound links.) - - Freedom of Choice Makes Stars Inevitable To see how freedom of choice could create such unequal distributions, consider a hypothetical population of a thousand people, each picking their 10 favorite blogs. One way to model such a system is simply to assume that each person has an equal chance of liking each blog. This distribution would be basically flat -- most blogs will have the same number of people listing it as a favorite. A few blogs will be more popular than average and a few less, of course, but that will be statistical noise. The bulk of the blogs will be of average popularity, and the highs and lows will not be too far different from this average. In this model, neither the quality of the writing nor other people's choices have any effect. In this model, there are no shared tastes, no preferred genres, no effects from marketing or recommendations from friends. But people's choices do affect one another. If we assume that any blog chosen by one user is more likely, by even a fractional amount, to be chosen by another user, the system changes dramatically. Alice, the first user, chooses her blogs unaffected by anyone else, but Bob has a slightly higher chance of liking Alice's blogs than the others. When Bob is done, any blog that both he and Alice like has a higher chance of being picked by Carmen, and so on, with a small number of blogs becoming increasingly likely to be chosen in the future because they were chosen in the past. Think of this positive feedback as a preference premium. The system assumes that later users come into an environment shaped by earlier users; the thousand-and-first user will not be selecting blogs at random, but will rather be affected, even if unconsciously, by the preference premiums built up in the system previously. Note that this model is absolutely mute as to why one blog might be preferred over another. Perhaps some writing is simply better than average (a preference for quality), perhaps people want the recom- mendations of others (a preference for marketing), perhaps there is value in reading the same blogs as your friends (a preference for "solidarity goods", things best enjoyed by a group). It could be all three, or some other effect entirely, and it could be different for different readers and different writers. What matters is that any tendency towards agreement in diverse and free systems, however small and for whatever reason, can create power law distributions. Because it arises naturally, changing this distribution would mean forcing hundreds of thousands of bloggers to link to certain blogs and to de-link others, which would require both global oversight and the application of force. Reversing the star system would mean destroying the village in order to save it. - - Inequality and Fairness Given the ubiquity of power law distributions, asking whether there inequality in the weblog world (or indeed almost any social system) is the wrong question, since the answer will always be yes. The question to ask is "Is the inequality fair?" Four things suggest that the current inequality is mostly fair. The first, of course, is the freedom in the weblog world in general. It costs nothing to launch a weblog, and there is no vetting process, so the threshold for having a weblog is only infinitesimally larger than the threshold for getting online in the first place. The second is that blogging is a daily activity. As beloved as Josh Marshall (www.TalkingPointsMemo.com) or Mark Pilgrim (www.DiveIntoMark.com) are, they would disappear if they stopped writing, or even cut back significantly. Blogs are not a good place to rest on your laurels. Third, the stars exist not because of some cliquish preference for one another, but because of the preference of hundreds of others pointing to them. Their popularity is a result of the kind of distributed approval it would be hard to fake. Finally, there is no real A-list, because there is no discontinuity. Though explanations of power laws (including the ones here) often focus on numbers like "12% of blogs account for 50% of the links", these are arbitrary markers. The largest step function in a power law is between the #1 and #2 positions, by definition. There is no A-list that is qualitatively different from their nearest neighbors, so any line separating more and less trafficked blogs is arbitrary. - - The Median Cannot Hold However, though the inequality is mostly fair now, the system is still young. Once a power law distribution exists, it can take on a certain amount of homeostasis, the tendency of a system to retain its form even against external pressures. Is the weblog world such a system? Are there people who are as talented or deserving as the current stars, but who are not getting anything like the traffic? Doubtless. Will this problem get worse in the future? Yes. Though there are more new bloggers and more new readers every day, most of the new readers are adding to the traffic of the top few blogs, while most new blogs are getting below average traffic, a gap that will grow as the weblog world. It's not impossible to launch a good new blog and become widely read, but it's harder than it was last year, and it will be harder still next year. At some point (probably one we've already passed), weblog technology will be seen as a platform for so many forms of publishing, filtering, aggregation, and syndication that blogging will stop referring to any particularly coherent activity. The term 'blog' will fall into the middle distance, as 'home page' and 'portal' have, words that used to mean some concrete thing, but which were stretched by use past the point of meaning. This will happen when head and tail of the power law distribution become so different that we can't think of J. Random Blogger and Glenn Reynolds of InstaPundit.com as doing the same thing. At the head will be webloggers who join the mainstream media (a phrase which seems to mean "media we've gotten used to.") The transformation here is simple - as a blogger's audience grows large, more people read her work than she can possibly read, she can't link to everyone who wants her attention, and she can't answer all her incoming mail or follow up to the comments on her site. The result of these pressures is that she becomes a broadcast outlet, distributing material without participating in conversations about it. Meanwhile, the long tail of weblogs with few readers will become conversational. In a world where most bloggers get below average traffic, audience size can't be the only metric for success. LiveJournal had this figured out years ago, by assuming that people would be writing for their friends, rather than some impersonal audience. Publishing an essay and having 3 random people read it is a recipe for disappointment, but publishing an account of your Saturday night and having your 3 closest friends read it feels like a conversation, especially if they follow up with their own accounts. LiveJournal has an edge on most other blogging platforms because it can keep far better track of friend and group relationships, but the rise of general blog tools like Trackback may enable this conversational mode for most blogs. In between blogs-as-mainstream-media and blogs-as-dinner-conversation will be Blogging Classic, blogs published by one or a few people, for a moderately-sized audience, with whom the authors have a relatively engaged relationship. Because of the continuing growth of the weblog world, more blogs in the future will follow this pattern than today. However, these blogs will be in the minority for both traffic (dwarfed by the mainstream media blogs) and overall number of blogs (outnum- bered by the conversational blogs.) Inequality occurs in large and unconstrained social systems for the same reasons stop-and-go traffic occurs on busy roads, not because it is anyone's goal, but because it is a reliable property that emerges from the normal functioning of the system. The relatively egalitarian distribution of readers in the early years had nothing to do with the nature of weblogs or webloggers. There just weren't enough blogs to have really unequal distributions. Now there are. - -=- <snippage...> * End ==================================================================== This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License. The licensor permits others to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work. In return, licensees must give the original author credit. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/1.0 or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA. 2003, Clay Shirky - --- end forwarded text -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 8.0 - not licensed for commercial use: www.pgp.com iQA/AwUBPkfBBcPxH8jf3ohaEQIdIgCg3RMXI9B1ru5YcEpXU8iPEUwghuIAnixX do40shJI2PSt5bD/KS4zINGq =1gs6 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Re: DOJ quietly drafts USA Patriot II w/crypto-in-a-crime penalty
by Tyler Durden 10 Feb '03

10 Feb '03

"I always thought that breathing during the commission of a crime should result in an extra five to ten years in prison." Or, failure to inform authorities of your specific plans to commit a crime should result in an additional 5 to 10. -TD >From: Declan McCullagh <declan(a)well.com> >To: Greg Newby <gbnewby(a)ils.unc.edu> >CC: cypherpunks(a)lne.com >Subject: Re: DOJ quietly drafts USA Patriot II w/crypto-in-a-crime penalty >Date: Sun, 9 Feb 2003 14:13:24 -0500 > >On Sat, Feb 08, 2003 at 10:36:35PM -0500, Greg Newby wrote: > > "Under the new law, running shoes will be classified > > as burgler's tools if their use is not authorized or > > exceeds reasonable levels for leisure activity." > >I always thought that breathing during the commission of a crime should >result in an extra five to ten years in prison. > >At least. > >-Declan _________________________________________________________________ The new MSN 8: smart spam protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail

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Modern Day Xeno: Moore's "Law" Doesn't Exist
by R. A. Hettinga 10 Feb '03

10 Feb '03

http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_11/tuomi/index.html First Monday The Lives and Death of Moore's Law by Ilkka Tuomi Abstract Moore's Law has been an important benchmark for developments in microelectronics and information processing for over three decades. During this time, its applications and interpretations have proliferated and expanded, often far beyond the validity of the original assumptions made by Moore. Technical considerations of optimal chip manufacturing costs have been expanded to processor performance, economics of computing, and social development. It is therefore useful to review the various interpretations of Moore's Law and empirical evidence that could support them. Such an analysis reveals that semiconductor technology has evolved during the last four decades under very special economic conditions. In particular, the rapid development of microelectronics implies that economic and social demand has played a limited role in this industry. Contrary to popular claims, it appears that the common versions of Moore's Law have not been valid during the last decades. As semiconductors are becoming important in economy and society, Moore's Law is now becoming an increasingly misleading predictor of future developments. Contents 1. Introduction 2. Moore's original formulation 3. Reformulations of Moore's Law 4. Losing the memory 5. Empirical evidence on Moore's Law 6. Computers and development 1. Introduction In 1965, Gordon Moore, Director of Fairchild Semiconductor's Research and Development Laboratories, wrote an article on the future development of semiconductor industry for the 35th anniversary issue of Electronics magazine. In the article, Moore noted that the complexity of minimum cost semiconductor components had doubled per year since the first prototype microchip was produced in 1959. This exponential increase in the number of components on a chip became later known as Moore's Law. In the 1980s, Moore's Law started to be described as the doubling of number of transistors on a chip every 18 months. At the beginning of the 1990s, Moore's Law became commonly interpreted as the doubling of microprocessor power every 18 months. In the 1990s, Moore's Law became widely associated with the claim that computing power at fixed cost is doubling every 18 months. Moore's Law has mainly been used to highlight the rapid change in information processing technologies. The growth in chip complexity and fast reduction in manufacturing costs have meant that technological advances have become important factors in economic, organizational, and social change. In fact, during the last decades a good first approximation for long-range planning has often been that information processing capacity is essentially free and technical possibilities are unlimited. Regular doubling means exponential growth. Exponential growth, however, also means that the fundamental physical limits of microelectronics are approaching rapidly. Several observers have therefore speculated about the possibility of "the end of Moore's Law." Often these speculations have concluded by noting that Moore's Law will probably be valid for at least "a few more generations of technology," or about a decade. An important example is the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS), which now extends to 2016. This roadmap is generated by a global group of experts and represents their consensus. Although it notes that within the next 10-15 years "most of the known technological capabilities will approach or have reached their limits," its basic assumption is that Moore's Law, although perhaps slowing down, still provides a good basis for predicting future developments in the semiconductor industry (ITRS, 2001) [ 1]. Of course, if Moore's Law is valid, independent of the exact nature of physical limits, exponential development means that the limits are only a few technological generations ahead. Order of magnitude errors in our current estimates of the ultimate limits of chip technology will create at most a few months of error in the time when they become bottlenecks in chip technology [ 2]. As a result, it is easy to predict that Moore's Law will become invalid soon. Speculations on the extended lifetime of Moore's Law are therefore often centered on quantum computing, bio-computing, DNA computers, and other theoretically possible information processing mechanisms. Such extensions, obviously, extend beyond semiconductor industry and the domain of Moore's Law. Indeed, it could be difficult to define a "component" or a "chip" in those future devices. Although discussion on physical limits, bottlenecks, and alternative information processing models may be important for chip manufacturers, it is, however, not the focus of this paper. Instead, I shall argue that there is no end to Moore's Law in sight simply because it never accurately described developments in microelectronics. It never was valid. Furthermore, it neglected factors that are becoming increasingly visible and important. The present paper argues that Moore's Law has not been a driver in the development of microelectronics or information technology. This may come as a surprise to some who have learned that Moore's Law has become a self-fulfilling prophecy that semiconductor industry firms have to follow if they want to survive. Instead, I shall argue that technical development in semiconductors during the last four decades has reflected the unique economic and social conditions under which the semiconductor industry has operated. This is important as these conditions are changing. In short, the observed technological trends and their analysis indicate that the semiconductor industry has been a core element in an industry cluster where development to an important extent has been driven by intra-cluster forces. The semiconductor industry, in other words, has been a laboratory of endogenous growth. This laboratory of endogenous growth has also made many failed experiments. Technology has not evolved in the ways predicted by Moore. Moore's Law has become popular partly because it has allowed great flexibility in interpretation and selective choice of supporting data. In this process, Moore's Law and evidence for it have retrospectively been interpreted to establish the validity of the Law. Often the presented evidence has been in visible contradiction with the Law. Technological advances in silicon chips have been relatively independent of end-user needs. During the last three decades, a good approximation in this industry has been that the supply of technology determines development. In economic terms, a key factor underlying the rapid development of semiconductor technology has been a continuous imbalance between supply and demand. It is, however, also clear that no one has exactly been breaking Moore's Law. Strictly speaking there is no such Law. Most discussions that quote Moore's Law are historically inaccurate and extend its scope far beyond available empirical evidence. Indeed, sociologically Moore's Law is a fascinating case of how myths are manufactured in the modern society and how such myths rapidly propagate into scientific articles, speeches of leading industrialists, and government policy reports around the world. It is therefore useful to revisit the evolution of Moore's Law. During its lifetime, its interpretations have involved mainly technical and economic considerations. The following discussion will therefore combine historical, technical, and economic concepts and data. The paper is organized as follows. In the next section, I revisit the original formulation of the Moore's Law and describe its basic assumptions. Section 3 discusses the revisions that Moore made to his original formulation during the 1970s. Section 4 describes the extensions of Moore's Law that became dominant in the 1980s and 1990s. Section 5 then evaluates available evidence to see whether any of the proposed formulations of Moore's Law can be justified. Its subsections review evidence on component counts, microprocessor performance, increase in computing power, and quality-adjusted cost of computing. Section 6 then briefly discusses industrial dynamics that underlie technical development in semiconductors and information processing, and points out some reasons why Moore's Law is becoming increasingly misleading in forecasting future developments in information processing technology. The paper concludes with some general observations on the relation between technical, economic, and social development. <Snip...> -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Re: Patriot II would outlaw encryption
by lcs Mixmaster Remailer 10 Feb '03

10 Feb '03

> actually......no....it isn't my bust. it is yours. > > it says: > > "knowingly and willfully uses > encryption technology to conceal any incriminating > communication" relating to a federal crime that they're > committing, or attempting to commit". > > Thus, after the fact.....I can send you an ecrypted email detailing my > crime and I won't be "upping the ante" another five years. Sure you will. The "ongoing conspiracy" (an agreement to commit a felony) continues after various events. For example, if Ted and Alice have an ongoing implicit understanding that they will meet in the shed behind her house occasionally to tend the five marijuana plants growing there, that is an ongoing conspiracy to commit a federal felony. So if, a week after Ted's last visit, Alice sends him an encrypted email saying "Come over and watch a video, or whatever", the prosecutor can clearly use that (if he can decrypt it) as 5 more years in prison, since it used encryption technology and concealed an incriminating communication (the crime being conspiracy) that they are commiting (ongoing). The prosecutors can get Ted's passphrase by granting him immunity (probably ONLY immunity from the encryption enhancement penalty, or best case, from that and conspiracy, still nailing him for the pot felony, or getting Alice to roll over on him for the whole deal!!!!) and forcing him to disclose it having eliminated his 5th amendment defenses. Then they have Alice for the pot felony, conspiracy, and the 5 year encryption booster. Of course, they will simply hang all of this draconian punishment over her head, her attorney will say they can fight for $75,000 and 2 years, during which she is in jail, or they can plead it out and become a felon with few further rights of citizenship. And if you "detail a crime" after the event in an encrypted communication, you've essentially included another person in the knowledge of a past crime in the expectation that such disclosure will remain secret from law enforcement. That is conspiracy to avoid prosecution and probably obstruction of justice. Conspiracy and obstruction are crimes, you've just used encryption in a federal felony, 5 year enhancement. Bye. For arguments re: protections from forced disclosure of keys, see http://www.rubberhose.org/current/src/doc/sergienko.html

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Re: Putting the "NSA Data Overwrite Standard" Legend to Death... (fwd)
by David Howe 10 Feb '03

10 Feb '03

at Monday, February 10, 2003 3:20 AM, Jim Choate <ravage(a)einstein.ssz.com> was seen to say: > On Sun, 9 Feb 2003, Sunder wrote: >> The OS doesn't boot until you type in your passphrase, plug in your >> USB fob, etc. and allow it to read the key. Like, Duh! You know, >> you really ought to stop smoking crack. > Spin doctor bullshit, you're not addressing the issue which is the > mounting of an encrypted partition -before- the OS loads (eg lilo, > which by the way doesn't really 'mount' a partition, encrypted or > otherwise - it just follows a vector to a boot image that gets dumped > into ram and the cpu gets a vector to execute it - one would hope it > was the -intended- OS or fs de-encryption algorithm). What does that > do? Nothing (unless you're the attacker). indeed. it usually boots a kernel image with whatever modules are required to get the main system up and running; > There are two and only two general applications for such an approach. > A standard workstation which isn't used unless there is a warm body > handy. The other being a server which one doesn't want to -reboot- > without human intervention. Both imply that the physical site is > -secure-, that is the weakness to all the current software solutions > along this line. The solution is only applicable to cold or moderately tamper-proofed systems, to prevent analysis of such systems if confiscated. It can only become a serious component in an overall scheme, but this is universally true - there is no magic shield you can fit to *anything* to solve all ills; this will add protection against the specified attacks and in fact already exists for windows (drivecrypt pluspack) - it is just non-windoze platforms that lack a product in this area.

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Re: FC: DOJ quietly drafts USA Patriot II, includes anti-crypto section
by Sunder 10 Feb '03

10 Feb '03

Time to start a new ad campaign: "You don't run around naked in public do you? Neither should your packets! Encrypt your traffic - it's just common sense!" "Your internet packets are naked! Clothe them with IPSEC" "Don't help the terrorists to your financial info - encrypt!" "You wouldn't want Osama reading your email, would you? Encrypt" Then when everything's encrypted, such laws can be challenged. ----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos--------------------------- + ^ + :NSA got $20Bil/year |Passwords are like underwear. You don't /|\ \|/ :and didn't stop 9-11|share them, you don't hang them on your/\|/\ <--*-->:Instead of rewarding|monitor, or under your keyboard, you \/|\/ /|\ :their failures, we |don't email them, or put them on a web \|/ + v + :should get refunds! |site, and you must change them very often. --------_sunder_(a)_sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------ On Fri, 7 Feb 2003, Declan McCullagh wrote: > Thanks to Joe for being the first one to submit this... Here's a duplicate > URL if the original is too slow: > http://www.privacy.org/patriot2draft.pdf > > Note the draft legislation creates a new federal felony of willfully using > encryption in the commission of a felony. "No more than five years" in > prison plus a hefty fine. This seems at first glance to be remarkably > similar to what was in the SAFE bill years ago. Here's a Politech message > from 1998, before the politechbot.com archives: > http://www.inet-one.com/cypherpunks/dir.98.05.11-98.05.17/msg00046.html

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Re: Putting the "NSA Data Overwrite Standard" Legend to Death... (fwd)
by Dave Howe 10 Feb '03

10 Feb '03

Jim Choate wrote: > On Sat, 8 Feb 2003, Sunder wrote: >> In real life this will not work as most Windoze hard disk encryption >> schemes can't encrypt the OS disk - and this is where the temp/cache >> stuff goes. Not always - certainly, windows cache goes to a partition that must be available at windows startup - but webbrowser cache can happily live on an encrypted disk (I have done this many times) Further, there is always the Drivecrypt pluspack which mounts an encrypted volume before windoze starts, and hands over to windoze as it comes up (I believe the same mechanism is used as for doublespaced drives, but I can't be sure; drivecrypt is closed source, hence I refuse to use it) >> At least with a unixish OS you can mount your crypto file systems up >> at boot time before the OS really starts up (before the system goes >> to multi-user mode for example (at the end of /etc/rc1.d and before >> the rc2.d init starts.) > Which is a blind path since those files -must- be unencrypted and if > they do mount the disk they have to have access to the key to > unencrypt the fs hence you're in the same boat as with Winblows. At least in theory a lilo boot could mount an encrypted partition while still in the initrd stage; as crypto support is moved into the kernel, I expect to see this become an available option.

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Re: My favorite line from the DOJ's latest draft bill
by Sunder 10 Feb '03

10 Feb '03

My new favorite is how Rumsfeld just said that the Europe Delay to give the inspectors more time will INCREASE the chance of war.... Uh huh... http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,78003,00.html My, my, how the reptiles have evolved the ability to speak out both sides of their mouth... or more aptly put out of another orifice better fitted to the application of toilet paper. ----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos--------------------------- + ^ + :NSA got $20Bil/year |Passwords are like underwear. You don't /|\ \|/ :and didn't stop 9-11|share them, you don't hang them on your/\|/\ <--*-->:Instead of rewarding|monitor, or under your keyboard, you \/|\/ /|\ :their failures, we |don't email them, or put them on a web \|/ + v + :should get refunds! |site, and you must change them very often. --------_sunder_(a)_sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------ On Sun, 9 Feb 2003, Declan McCullagh wrote: > http://www.dailyrotten.com/source-docs/patriot2draft.html > terrorism is at least as dangerous to the United States' national security > as drug offenses

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Re: The Space Shuttle's Secret Military Mission
by Mike Rosing 10 Feb '03

10 Feb '03

On Mon, 10 Feb 2003 GaryJeffers(a)aol.com wrote: > > http://www.aci.net/kalliste/columbia_spectral.htm I love conspiricy theory! Take totally unrelated stuff, mix it together and voila - instant evil! The problem with this article is that it uses a reference (to a really cool idea BTW) for a nuclear *rocket engine* and then claims that this is an *actual* power supply! It's totally bogus dude. But thanks for the reference to the rocket engine, I need to read that paper! Patience, persistence, truth, Dr. mike

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